Connect your iPhone to Microsoft Office 365

Office 365, the cloud-based collaboration platform from Microsoft, can actually be iPhone-friendly. Will Kelly shows you how to connect your iPhone to Office 365.

Microsoft Office 365, a cloud-based collaboration platform, is starting to get a lot of attention from Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs) and enterprises wanting to outsource their Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange email, and Unified Communications (UC). While some critics cite Office 365 as not being "mobile enough," the iPhone setup is quite friendly and certainly a time-saver for organizations that are used to managing more complicated smartphone/email server setups in house.

Get access to Office 365

Whether you're a one-man shop, you work for a company that's moving to Office 365, or you just took a job with an employer that uses Office 365, you must have an Office 365 account prior to setting up your iPhone. Depending on your organization's IT and security policies, your email account may require registration the first time you login, so work with your IT people to make sure.

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Mobile security policies and email access

Office 365 does include full mobile policies, including Pin Lock, Remote Wipe, and device encryption. Your Office 365 administrator is able to configure these security policies in Exchange Online under Mail | Options | My Organization. In fact, only an administrator can access these settings.

Setup Microsoft Exchange email

Hosted Microsoft Exchange email is certainly one of the drivers for people and organizations to move to Office 365, and iPhone users don't need to be left out.

The setup in this section was run on an iPhone 4 with iOS 5.1, but it should work with all recent model iPhones, including the 3GS. The same steps will work if you want to connect your iPad to Office 365 as well.

Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support is built into iOS, providing push email, calendar, and contacts. Here are the steps to setup ActiveSync on your iPhone so that you can connect to Office 365 and synchronize your email, calendar, and contacts data between your iPhone and Office 365 account.

Enter your email address, username, and password.

Enter the Exchange Server setup information (provided to you while getting access to Office 365 or from your IT staff), and then tap Next. Your iPhone will try to locate your Exchange Online Server. If your iPhone can't locate the server, you'll need to enter your Office 365 Exchange Server's complete address in the Server field on the Account page (see Figure D).

Figure D

You may need to enter your Office 365 Exchange Server settings on the Account page.

Choose which content you would like to synchronize: your mail, contacts, and calendars. Tap Save when you have made your selections.

While setting up your iPhone for Office 365, you may be prompted to enter a passcode. Enter in a new passcode of your own creation. Whether or not you have to setup a passcode varies on the security setup as established by your Office 365 administrator.

Accessing other Office 365 features with an iPhone

While email and calendar are obvious for mobile access, you can get limited mobile access to SharePoint Team Sites and access to the Lync Online's Unified Communications (UC) features.

Team Site and document access: While you do have native access to Office 365 Team Sites from your iPhone, it's no frills and not very usable (it only allows you to refer to information). However, access to documents is also available through Office 2010 WebApps. If you require full iPhone access with some interactivity to your Office 365 team site and documents, I suggest resorting to one of the many SharePoint apps -- like SharePlus or Moshare -- in the App Store.
Figure E

Office 365 Team Site as it appears on an iPhone 4.

Microsoft Lync 2010 for iPhone: Part of Microsoft's recent embracing of iOS is the Microsoft Lync 2010 app (see Figure F). This app only works with a Microsoft Office 365/Lync Online account and brings features like presence, Lync conference calls (using only a single touch), Enterprise Voice calls, and Transport Layer Security (TLS) to keep corporate data locked down tight.
Figure F

The Microsoft Lync 2010 app is a free download from the App Store.

Office 365 and the iPhone together

By setting up your iPhone with Office 365, you'll get low-hassle mobile email, calendaring, and contacts that won't tax too much of your IT staff's time, whether or not it's for corporate or Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) iPhones.

Do you have Office 365 connected to your iPhone? Share you experience and insight in the discussion thread below.

About Will Kelly

Will Kelly is a freelance technical writer and analyst currently focusing on enterprise mobility, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and the consumerization of IT. He has also written about cloud computing, Big Data, virtualization, project management ap...

Full Bio

Will Kelly is a freelance technical writer and analyst currently focusing on enterprise mobility, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and the consumerization of IT. He has also written about cloud computing, Big Data, virtualization, project management applications, Google Apps, Microsoft technologies, and online collaboration for TechRepublic and other sites. Will also works as a contract technical writer for clients in the Washington, DC area and nationwide. Follow Will on Twitter: @willkelly.

Setting up the above is pretty intuitive...you just follow their lead.

What we ARE having trouble with is multiple calendars. I have two calendars running concurrently, one off my phone and one in 365. You can copy/paste the iphone one over, but if I am out of the office and make an appointment, it doesnt sync with my main calendar. I have to keep copying things over.

Effectively, it's my historic calendar that came over with my pst file. That still lives on my iphone, and the one on the pc/cloud is a different one with the same name. I can have them on screen side by side, but this is hugely counter productive as I need just one consolidated calendar. With 2, I am already missing things.

Calling 365 up and asking them has been futile, as they wont even talk to us unless we give them our 'admin password'. We only installed it 3 weeks ago, and have given them all of the passwords that it may be. Apparently its something else. This is impossible, so we cant even ask Microsoft.

We have a set signature block for Outlook in Office365 which has our certification images included. We'd like that to also be available on the Iphone 4 and 5, but it won't display the images - says the link is unavailable. On the Iphone itself, I can create the signature easily as text but inserting complete images in the signature instead of just links? I can't work out how.

I was thinking the same thing. I'm the admin for my company on office 365 and we have more Andriod's connected then iPhones. If you really want to help an admin out, forget about iPhone and Andriod, tell people how to connect their Blackberry because I can't seem to help those folks, appearently it's much more complicated. iPhones and Andriods are pretty straight forward.
On a related issue, I like the ability in Office 365 to create Policies for devices like cell phones that help protect your data by requiring passwords and or encryption (as well as many other options) and also the ability to wipe the device should it be lost or stolen.